The Effortless Experience™

The Key to Customer Loyalty

Don’t Exceed ExpectationsMake It Easy

When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers by helping them solve their problems. However, customer service interactions are nearly four times more likely to lead to disloyalty than loyalty.

Many companies try to drive customer loyalty by delighting them—exceeding customer expectations with above-and-beyond service. Yet this strategy is difficult and costly to deliver; worse, it fails to deliver a proportionate increase in loyalty.

The Effortless ExperienceTM

Why Consumers DislikeCustomer Service

Consumers do not like talking to customer service representatives: they prefer to find solutions to their problem themselves. Find out the top five reasons consumers do not want to talk to your customer service team in our downloadable infographic.

Is Customer Service Hurting Your Brand?

Over 28 million people may see or hear bad things about your company in a year. Get the data behind this displayed in our downloadable infographic. Use it to share insights into the impact your customer service strategy could have on your brand with the business.

The New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

Instead of struggling to delight customers, companies should create low-effort service experiences that help their customers solve problems quickly and easily. Our research shows this is the most successful way to build customer loyalty.

Customer effort is an excellent indicator of customer intent to repurchase and increase spend. To reduce customer effort, leading organizations:

The customer effort approach drives results that we couldn't achieve via other means.

”

Dan Rourke Director of Software Support HomeAway, Inc.

What IsCustomer Effort?

Customer effort is not just about what a customer has to do, but also how he or she feels about an interaction. In fact, 65% of effort comes from how the service rep made the customer feel.

Companies must focus on hiring, developing, and reinforcing low-effort skills of service reps so they can actively guide customers and preempt their needs during service interactions. By assessing and measuring customer effort, companies can maintain low-effort service delivery.

The Low-Effort Path

CEB helps customer service organizations drive customer loyalty by supporting their adoption of the low-effort path. See how this proven method improves your customer service experiences while reducing disloyalty and lowering costs: access and save the infographic to demonstrate value for your business.

Reps Who Provide Low-Effort Service

Our research shows there are seven distinct customer service rep profiles. One type is better at naturally providing low-effort customer service. Find out what makes these seven profiles different, and which one wins at providing low-effort service. This research was featured in Harvard Business Review.

Effortless Experience™Dashboard

Identify where customers expend the most effort within the service experience, and target improvements in the areas that will have the greatest impact on loyalty. The Dashboard is designed to help you:

Nick Toman

Rick DeLisi

Case Studies

By using data from the Effortless Experience™ Dashboard, LoyaltyOne was able to identify the best opportunities to decrease customer effort and costs by more effectively guiding customers to self-service channels.

Nuon wanted to transform its team of Energy Advisors from reactive problem solvers to consultants and advocates for customers. To develop these capabilities, Nuon partnered with CEB, now Gartner, to launch a successfulpilot of the Effortless Experience™ Capabilities Builder program.

The best way to understand if a company is providing good customer service is how easy it is for customers to get what they came for; internally at CEB, we call this the "PITAF" (pain in the a** factor).